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Mosaic: Trends in YA Covers

Dystopian Fiction: What is it really?With the glut of so-called dystopian fiction on the YA market lately, it’s clear that many publishers are throwing the label around willy-nilly, perhaps because it sounds better than “post-apocalyptic science fiction”, which is what most of these books really are. But what IS a dystopia, really?

Top Ten Books Read in 2011My ten favourite books read last year.

On Writing "Reviews", or whatever you want to call themWhat is it we book bloggers do here? Are we writing reviews or just sharing our thoughts? What IS a book review, anyway?

This deceptively simple novel offers a powerful and damning examination of Australia’s colonial history and the price paid by the continent’s diverse first peoples. It is also impossible to discuss or review this book without destroying the source of its impact, so I will offer a very short, non-spoiler review followed by a proper one that you should absolutely not read if you intend to read this book. Let’s not make the same mistake they made with Never Let Me Go, people!

The title Terra Nullius refers to the British empire’s claim upon the continent of Australia, a claim that was justified on the erroneous but useful insistence that it was unclaimed land. ‘Terra nullius’, a Latin term, is generally translated as ‘nobody’s land’, meaning that the British claimed the continent for themselves, without a treaty, because they argued that it didn’t belong to anyone – and certainly not the natives, because they did not appear to farm it or own it as Europeans understand land ownership (Aboriginal peoples did, in fact, have territory, homes, rich and diverse cultural beliefs and traditions, industry and agriculture, it just wasn’t recognised by the colonisers). The myth of terra nullius continued long into the 20th century when it was finally, officially nixed by the Australian High Court in 1992 when it ruled, at the culmination of the Mabo case, that the land was owned and occupied by others, before the Europeans.

Coleman’s Terra Nullius is instantly recognisable as a colonial narrative written from a post-colonial – and indigenous – perspective. The setting – the hot, arid and vast terrain of Western Australia – is so richly drawn I felt that suffocating heat, the scarcity of water, the desperate need for shade. The characters are divided into two – the Settlers and the Natives – and the ideological and cultural misunderstandings between them, especially on the side of the Settlers, is palpable. The arrogance and over-confidence of the Settlers feels all-too familiar and the destructive cost of colonisation on indigenous culture and individuals is ever-present. So, too, is the desperate need to be reunited with the families and tribes the Natives have been forcibly removed from, their longing and fear and sense of utter powerlessness. All of it strongly conjured British colonisation in my mind, as intended, even though physical descriptions are few and far between. Here, the landscape triumphs as the third party, the unchanging, unconquerable land that one must adapt to, not change to suit. A silent, uncaring witness to conflict, but a vulnerable, fragile one, too. The land will always win, effortlessly. It is an underlying idea that meanders through the narrative, always present but in the background, a truth against which the conflict of colonisation plays out.

“A sun like that, heat like that – it bleached the entire sky yellow-white, nothing like the blue sky one was used to from home. It was that sky that was a warning, the yellow light a warning that this was not a hospital place. It was the glow of pain, the glow of the end of the world. It was not a friendly colour for a sky to be.” (p.39)

“It was a land of bones he walked, a land of death and bones and pain. He had helped make it that way, had added bones to the soil. He was as guilty as any other. He knew now though, that when you plant bones, nothing grows from them. Nothing but pain. As much as his homesickness racked at his soul there was no use thinking about it. This camp in the bush was his home – a series of camps in the bush would be his home until they planted his bones.” (p.86)

That idea, alone, offered a strong and confronting reading in the first 9 chapters of Terra Nullius. For a reader with some knowledge of Australian colonial history, the story – while slow, ponderous even – is confronting in its sense of realism, place and time. But Coleman’s only just getting started, and the real story begins in chapter 10.

SPOILERS

Seriously, DO NOT read on unless you have already read the book!

So strong was my understanding that I was reading historical fiction about colonial Australia – about the invasion of the British and the impact on the indigenous peoples – that I honestly did not see the twist coming, not at all. I am not the type of reader who tries to be more clever than a book: I like to read a novel the way it is intended, not try to figure out how it will end. I don’t see the point in such an exercise, which seems like one of pure ego. I mentioned Never Let Me Go before – it has a similarly confronting ‘twist’ several chapters in that I did not see coming, and I was so dismayed to find that, as the book gained popularity – and particularly once the film came out – everyone was so free with the word ‘clones’. Possibly reviews in the papers – the Guardian etc. – have done the same thing with Coleman’s novel; I didn’t check, but in this case the word would be ‘aliens’.

That’s right: as the book jacket says, “This is not the Australia of our history. This Terra Nullius is something new, but all too familiar.” It’s an alien invasion. Or, rather, it’s several decades later, when ‘invasion’ has become ‘settlement’. And the result is devastating, heartbreaking and even more tragic for knowing that, really, it is history not fiction.

The Settlers are dubbed ‘toads’ by the Natives (and, as the narrative points out a bit heavy-handedly, the concept of racial difference amongst humans has disappeared entirely thanks to this new invasion – everyone’s just ‘human). The aliens share some physical similarities but are more amphibian and require a lot of water, even just moisture in the air, to survive. Australia, then, is definitely not a hospital place for them, but that doesn’t stop them – they’ve already taken the rest of the world, they can’t stop there. While the parallels between the alien Toads and the British empire are visible, so too are the parallels between the attitudes of the British and those of this new coloniser:

“The arrival of the Toads had eliminated all racism and hate within the human species. It was not that with a common enemy the humans had decided to work together – humans never made a decision to no longer fight between themselves. Instead the colonisation by the Settlers simply ended all discrimination within the human race by taking away all the imbalance. There was no caste or class within humans; to the Toads who now owned the planet and everyone on it all humans had the same low status. To the Toads, all humans were nothing more than animals.

With no distinctions between humans, no rights, no countries, the human race was in the process of homogenisation. A slave is a slave is a slave. Humans had in the past sought to assimilate all humans into one group – to breed out colour, destroy other cultures. Where they had failed the Toads had been successful.” (p.159)

Such sentiments can be found in the writings of colonisers, in the newspapers and diary entries of Settlers in our own history. As Coleman says in her Note at the end, everything in this book is based on things that actually happened, were actually said, during the colonisation of Australia by the British. In that sense, it’s not a new story, but the new circumstances puts the old into stark relief. I have read other books this way – John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began, for example, can work easily as an analogy for colonisation from the Aboriginal perspective, whether he intended it or not, but here, Coleman is deliberately making this confronting and often violent representation of our colonial past.

The main characters in the novel are Jacky, a young Native man who escapes from the Settler farm, fleeing on foot to try and find the family he was taken from as a child; Sister Bagra, the ‘mother’ of the nuns who run a mission for Native children, turning them into useful, obedient servants (that is, slaves); Johnny Star, a trooper who deserted and is taken in by a small gang of Native outlaws; Esperance, a young woman living with one of the few remaining ‘free’ tribes of humans in the outback; and Sergeant Rohan, a trooper sent to capture Jacky. Other characters whose perspectives we see this new and frightening world from include an inspector from the home world, come to investigate reports of cruelty against Natives at Sister Bagra’s mission; and the Devil, the head of the Department for the Protection of Natives.

The story is slow-moving and the first part took me a while to get through, but that exposition is important. The reader plays an integral role in the narrative; just as other texts – like the film Jindabyne – involve the audience in subtle ways, putting them in the position of colluding with a murderer of aborigines, or of unapologetic coloniser, the first nine chapters are vital to both creating the false confidence that I felt in thinking I knew this narrative, understood the players and the history; and to establishing that strong relationship between what has been done in the past and what is done in this hypothetical future. The intent is to challenge the on-going discrimination and low-class (or caste) status experienced by Australian aborigines today. It might seem obvious – too obvious – but I do feel that we are deliberately blind to anything more subtle, in this country.

As speculative fiction goes, this has dystopian elements as well as offering an allegory of British colonisation. This is Coleman’s debut novel and, as such, the writing is a little under-developed in places, a little lacking in subtlety at times, and, in places, the punctuation could be clearer for better flow. Characterisation is a bit sparse, limited to boldly-drawn strokes and tropes, and there’s not much verisimilitude. However, there are also some really lovely passages and the power of the narrative and its setting cannot be overlooked. Likewise, the success of those early chapters, when I thought I was reading historical fiction, was such that even at the end I experienced the sensation of overlap: that the Toads and the British were layered one on top of the other, a weird hologrammatic effect that ensured the allegorical nature of the aliens was never lost.

When stressed, I tend to gravitate towards popular fiction – literary and non-fiction books become too much like work, as they do the opposite of helping me switch my brain off: they make me think too much. They make me think too much about work, especially. Not at all restful, and it’s been a hellish year. I thought last year was bad, didn’t know it could be topped, but compared to this year I’m all nostalgic for 2016! Last year, I couldn’t get into any book, really struggled to finish anything.

This year, I’ve taken refuge in romance and fantasy, especially – with a few more literary titles here and there. Of course, the other problem remains: finding the time (and energy) to maintain this blog. I haven’t posted since February, which makes me cringe, and have begun way too many posts to count over the last three years. However, I’ve also read some great books – and some really not so great – that I want to share with you. Let’s start with one of the great ones.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Pan Books, 2016) is a real gem, an original fantasy set in a land that is slowly being taken over by the Wood. I’m always drawn to stories where woods, forests, are sentient or something like it. Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood – now celebrating its 30th anniversary – is an old favourite of mine. Whether it’s a British- or European-style wood or the equally much-mythologised Australian Bush, I am fascinated and all a-tingle over stories about them. The wood of the northern hemisphere tends to be one that acts against human populations, spreading, manipulating, while the Bush of the Australian continent tends to be represented as a force that traps, beguiles, lures and vanishes people. Both are often depicted as oppressive, but in subtly different ways – and of course, our impression of the Bush is heavily influenced by the European woods, a cultural understanding that the settlers brought with them.

Novik’s Wood is a wood betrayed and determined to wreak revenge. Wizards and witches protect the realm as much as they can, but are often on the defensive, reacting to raids of creatures in villages. One touch of anything produced by the Wood and it spreads within them, like a toxin, destroying their humanity. Animals, too, are taken over. And the Wood keeps moving, taking over more land, more villages. Agnieszka lives in one of these villages. The people are dependent on the help of the local, ageless wizard, known as the Dragon, who lives in a tall tower. Every ten years, the Dragon comes out of his tower and takes a young local girl from her home, not to be seen again for the next ten years. Agnieszka isn’t afraid of being taken by the Dragon: everyone knows he will take her best friend, the beautiful Kasia. So there is no time to think or react when instead, reluctantly, he takes Agnieszka.

I enjoyed Novik’s adult fantasy His Majesty’s Dragon, an alternate history story about the Napoleonic Wars, but not enough to continue with the rest of the Temeraire series. Uprooted, though, held me entranced. It is not predictable, the characters are interesting – Agnieszka, the narrator, is a delight of unpretentious intelligence and earthy independence, and the Dragon, Sarkan, is both charismatic and unlikeable; a delicious combination – and the setting is tangible, seething with hostility. The Wood is, of course, the real draw here, and its story a tragic one.

If one thing frustrated me a bit, it was Agnieszka’s lack of thinking and reflecting on things – odd, for a first-person narrator. Perhaps I’m more accustomed to Elspeth Gordie’s style of musing? There were times when things really were her fault, and I wished, more than once, that she would acknowledge it, apologise, communicate – especially with Sarkan (the Dragon). While Sarkan comes across as cold, unfeeling, angry and impatient, he’s also often right, and Agnieszka lost a bit of my respect by never discussing what had just happened and reflecting on her mistakes. Some open communication – some communication at all – was missing. Still, it’s a small quibble about an otherwise excellent stand-alone fantasy. (read in September 2017)

I started reading Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (Hodder& Stoughton, 2017) as a standalone novel, I’m not even sure why, but I had a panicky moment when it became apparent that in no way could the story be satisfactorily resolved in one volume, followed by sheer relief to learn that it is a new series. Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy is one of the best works of original fantasy I’ve read (begin with Daughter of Smoke & Bone and prepare to be amazed and delighted!), so as soon as I learned she had a new book coming out I put in my order straight-away. Strange the Dreamer did not disappoint.

It is the story of Lazlo Strange, an orphan of war who works in the library – a vast, impressive palace of a place, every bibliophile’s wet dream. He is obsessed by the story of Weep, a fabled city whose real name has been lost to time – or magic. Across the world, at the same moment, everyone forgot what it was really called. The passage there became barred to travellers: the magical, amazing city may as well have been utterly destroyed. No one cares about what happened there or if it still exists, no one but Lazlo, and he has no status.

So it is with amazement that the city receives visitors from Weep. Led by the legendary Godslayer, the men and women who arrive are looking for skills they have lost. Lazlo manages to get a place in the group through his intimate knowledge of Weep and ability to speak their language. But rebuilding the city of Weep and resurrecting their culture is not the aim: it is something that has to be seen to be believed. The home of the Gods hovers, unmoving, over the city of Weep, a giant blue statue of an angel; wings spread wide, it blocks the sun from the city below and barely anything grows. The people of Weep have lived beneath it for decades and it is time to find a way to be rid of it for good. However, the statue that they believe to be empty – because the Godslayer killed the Gods many years ago, after long servitude and years of cruelty at their hands – is still home to five young gods who live there in hiding. Only one can venture down into the city, through dreams that she turns into nightmares in revenge for the slayings, and it is in Lazlo’s dreams that she meets him, the first person ever to be able to see and hear her in a dream.

Taylor’s work is always original, fresh and exciting, and this is no exception. Richly detailed, populated with interesting, layered characters and a world that I could feel, taste, see, experience, Taylor remains one of my favourite authors. (Read in May 2017)

Angela Slatter’s debut novel Vigil (Jo Fletcher Books, 2016), and the first in a new series, is a welcome addition to the Urban Fantasy sub-genre. Set in Brisbane, the first-person narrator/protagonist, Verity Fassbinder, is half-human, half-Weyrd; as such, she’s able to straddle both worlds. The Weyrd world is an unseen one, existing alongside the human one, hidden behind glamours and wards. Verity works as a private investigator and is often hired by the ruling Weyrd council, of which her ex-boyfriend, Bela (Weyrd species not revealed, though possibly a type of vampire??), is one.

Vigil begins with some missing children and a winemaker – the product being dying children’s tears, illegal but much valued by wealthy Weyrd – but soon escalates from there to a golem that’s terrorising the city and some mysteriously murdered sirens. As Verity’s injuries increase in tandem with her ability to piss people off, the terrifying forces she is contending with turn their gaze on her and things become frightening personal.

Vigil launches you straight into this world and leaves you struggling to keep up, at first anyway. Exposition is doled out further on, so that when you do figure out what’s what in this world, you feel like you’ve earned it. But it does make it hard to follow at first, which makes it harder to care: about the characters, about the world.

Verity is a classic Urban Fantasy protagonist: smart-mouthed, lacking in tact but not in humour and with a satisfying penchant for disrespecting authority. There’s a past here that’s slowly being revealed: we learn about her father and what he did that made him so infamous, but there are blank or fuzzy details too that will hopefully be filled in in later books (I have the second ready to go: Corpselight).

While plotwise, Vigil becomes pretty engrossing once you get over the confusion of the early chapters, it is a little weak on relationship-building. Verity meets a guy called David (named after the author’s partner, I’m assuming) – she literally bumps into him, then encounters him again, seemingly randomly, but it made me suspicious of him. Their relationship moves pretty quickly and from what little we get to know of him, he seems like a great guy, but the problem is, we don’t really get to know him, or see what Verity is like in a relationship. It’s highly dissatisfying, to say the least, both in terms of building a believable protagonist who I care about (she needs to have people she cares about – and she does – but I need to believe that she has them, too) and in terms of building a believable relationship for her. It needed fleshing out, a bit more care – before you know it, they’ve moved in together, which is lovely, but who is this guy? He’s a token love interest, which meant that the ending lacked the emotional punch and tension it needed. (Read in August 2017)

Three Dark Crowns (Macmillan, 2016) is the first in Kendare Blake’s new Young Adult fantasy series. The author of Anna Dressed in Blood (which I have a copy of but haven’t read yet) has created what I can only say is a bizarre yet interesting new world. The island of Fennbirn is ruled by a queen; when the queen has an heir she always, always gives birth to triplet girls – and when those three girls turn sixteen, they have a year to kill the other two and claim the crown. Each sister is possessed of a different power. This time around, Mirabella is a strong elemental who came into her power as a child and has the backing of the Temple priestesses; Katharine is a poisoner who has not yet shown any resistance to poisons; and Arsinoe is a naturalist who, similarly to Katharine, has not yet come into her power – she has no familiar, so ability to make things grow.

There is much pomp and ceremony with the process, and the three girls have not seen each other since they were six; in the ten years since, their whole lives have been about preparing for this fight for the crown, and in developing a hatred for their sisters. Only this time, Mirabella remembers the brief childhood they had together, and knows she cannot kill for the crown; Katharine lacks confidence and is a pawn of the powerful Arron family; and Arsinoe is prepared to practice low magic to fake her powers – or make them come.

It is certainly an interesting, absorbing world and an exciting premise. The story moves along very swiftly and there are some unpredictable moments (and some predictable ones). However, it is written like a movie in prose form – or, rather, a contemporary television series. There are a lot of cuts between the three story lines, between major and minor characters, and not a lot of genuine, authentic character-building or world-building. The world is a thinly-sketched in backdrop, and some of it doesn’t make much sense (also, distance and time are played with liberally). There is a wide panoply of supporting characters whose personalities are quickly sketched in (or not – some are as unknown at the end as they are at the start, serving mostly as plot devices) without a whole lot of backstory. It’s not necessarily a flaw – many wouldn’t think so – but I worry that this new style of writing fiction that shows the direct influence of our television-saturated culture means we are losing the very qualities that separate fiction from television and make it a distinct and worthwhile medium. I don’t want to read a book as if I’m watching the telly – that’s what my TV is for. Fiction gives us something TV can’t. That’s not a problem to overcome, that’s something to appreciate.

I have the next book in this series and will start reading it soon. (Read in September 2017)

David Baldacci has a long career writing adult mystery-thrillers (with book covers indistinguishable from John Grisham, James Patterson etc. etc.), so I felt like I’d never heard of him when I saw this Young Adult Fantasy – in fact, I still have a hard time reconciling the two authors as the same man! Never having read anything by Baldacci before, I can’t compare writing or narrative styles between the genres, but was pleasantly engaged in The Finisher (Macmillan Children’s Books, 2014). With some very lovely (and dark) illustrations by Nathan Aardvark, this fantasy was not what I was expecting, both in terms of plot and setting.

Vega Jane is not quite fifteen years old but has already been working at Stacks as a Finisher for two years – education is not highly valued in Wormwood. Her younger brother John is still at Learning, as they call it, and is very intelligent. Their parents are in Care, and little more than living vegetables. Their grandfather, Virgil, suffered an ‘Event’ shortly after their grandmother, Calliope, died, when Vega was only six. An Event is a mysterious thing that no one has seen, which takes a person away, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

Wormwood is a place of rough manners, coarse values and vulgar patriarchy. It is encircled by a wood; beyond that is the Quag, a vast, dangerous terrain populated by terrifying monsters – some of which find their way into the village from time to time. Ruled by a powerful council, there is little reason to enjoy life, hardly any food for most who live there, and real terrors to keep people in line.

Vega’s life changes the night her friend and fellow Finisher, Quentin, flees Wormwood and goes into the Quag. He leaves behind a map of the Quag for Vega Jane, which she inks onto her body so she can destroy the physical copy. Despite being questioned by the Council, she maintains her secrets, not even sharing them with her best friend, Delph. The map itself doesn’t change anything for Vega – with a brother to look after and parents in Care, she has no interest in following Quentin to certain death – but it drives her to look for answers in places long barred: such as Stacks. The old, tall building with its hidden floors proves to be full of tricks and powerful objects, and in its rooms Vega discovers much more to her world than she ever knew.

There is much that still puzzles me about this story, particularly the setting, which doesn’t always make logical sense. They are one isolated village that is in possession of materials that they do not seem to produce, and certainly their are many questions as to its origins and its purpose – and why the Council are so determined to prevent people from leaving it. (It did, of course, bring to mind the film The Village, which I love, but this has little in common with that.) I had read it as a standalone novel, but have just found out that the author is working on the sequel. I’m pleased to hear it, mostly because there are way too many unanswered questions.

The story did not follow the plot that the blurb led me to expect; a disingenuous blurb! Rather, it is the story of Vega Jane’s discovery of village secrets and what leads up to her escaping – I don’t feel that mentioning that is a spoiler, as it’s patently clear that she will leave Wormwood. It takes the entire book, all 506 pages, to get to that point, though – had I known that, I would have read it differently, relaxed more into it. It’s interesting, reading a Fantasy novel by an author who doesn’t typically write fantasy: it does not always follow the rules, making it both fresh and also, at times, a bit confusing. It’s a tricky world to create and lead a reader through: the narrator is steeped in ignorance, on a journey of discovery, but there’s an even bigger gulf between the reader and knowledge. A bit more well-placed exposition might have helped smooth the way.

An enjoyable, often exciting read with a heroine I genuinely liked. (Read in October 2017)

Now we come to the ones that aren’t as memorable, or that I read earlier this year and just have general things to say about.

I’ll start with another YA speculative fiction novel. I was hoping for great things from Valentine by Jodi McAlister (Penguin Books, 2017), but while I liked it well enough, I found it to be a bit predictable. It brings old European myths and folklore to a contemporary setting and tells the story of Pearl, who is one of four teenagers in the same town who were all born on Valentine’s day. One of them is the Valentine: a changeling. The four teens are at the centre of an ancient war between Seelie and Unseelie, and because the Unseelie don’t know who the Valentine is, they’re targeting all four teenagers. Pearl finds a new ally and friend in handsome Finn – and I’m sorry, but it seemed too obvious that he was the Valentine, and equally obvious that Pearl’s mother is – was – not quite human. Why is Pearl so blind to things, when all this fae business has taken over her world view? It was odd.
That said, I enjoyed the characters and the story and gave it , so I must have liked it better than I remember. This is the first in a series; each one will take on a different myth. (Read in March 2017)

Ultraviolet, by Canadian writer RJ Anderson (Orchard Books, 2011), is as different to the usual American YA books as Australian ones are – always refreshing (I started reading Mila 2.0 several weeks ago and, oh, yawn, it’s paint-by-numbers formulaic in the worst possible way!). Anderson dares to take the story all the way through to an ending that made it all worth it, even as my eyebrows disappeared into my hair.

Alison is sixteen and a synesthesia – not that she knows that’s what she is, as her mother has long taught her to hide her true nature. She is also in a mental institute for teens, there for observation, psychiatric assessment – and as punishment for being involved in the disappearance of her classmate, Tori, a popular girl who looked at Alison like she was a freak. Did Alison have something to do with her disintegration into nothing? Alison is sure she killed Tori, and her synesthesia is only getting stronger and more paralysing.

Then Dr Faraday arrives at the centre, working on research which Alison can help with. It is he who gives her a name for her condition, and listens to her as if she weren’t mad, or dangerous. But Faraday isn’t who he seems, and their relationship crosses the boundary between doctor and patient. Was Alison wrong to trust him?

I wasn’t sure about this one; I seemed to read it with an expectation of disliking it, or being bored by it, but it only got more and more interesting as it progressed. I find it hard to read books in which characters are oppressed by other people’s stronger ideas of them, when they use language to confine who you are – I find it physically hard to read those scenes where people, such as her psychiatrist at the institute – and even her own mother – do that to Alison. The second half makes up for the slow pacing of the first, the synesthesia is fascinating, and if anything, I was disappointed to have it end just when I was really getting into it! (Read in May 2017)

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard (Orion 2015) has an interesting premise and … that’s about it. Society in Norta is divided into Reds and Silvers: that is to say, the colour of your blood. The Silvers have silver blood and powers – sometimes deadly ones, from super strength to fire to controlling metal. With their red blood, the Reds are the commoners, the peasants or serfs, practically a slave class. Fodder for an on-going war with a neighbouring country that has been going on forever and with little purpose.

Mare is seventeen and a Red girl from the village of Stilts – so named because, as you can surmise, the homes are built on stilts to avoid flood waters. She is also a Red with a Power: the ability to control, even generate, electricity. Her entry into the Silver city as a servant leads to this self-discovery, as well as a new life as an elite, hiding in plain sight with the royal family. Her affiliation is staunchly with the Reds, though, and Mare becomes embroiled with the resistance – with disastrous consequences.

The premise is an interesting one (though I keep thinking I’ve come across it before somewhere), and I love stories in which characters have powers (which began in primary school when I discovered the Obernewtyn Chronicles and continued later with the X-Men), but the plot was a bit pedestrian, rather predictable, and the characters and the setting not very well fleshed out. The ending made me roll my eyes a bit. (Read in April 2017)

Throne of Glass begins strongly, with a heroine who has moments of charisma but who, overall, fails to be the deadly assassin she supposedly is. We’re told that Celaena’s the greatest assassin (yes, well before she turned eighteen, the age she is at the start of this novel), but we never really get to see it. She’s more of an American teenager in high school than super-villain/hero of a fantasy world, and that undermined the whole book.

I quite enjoyed aspects of the plot, especially the competition for king’s champion – several tests were skipped over entirely or shortened, but the ones that were featured were exciting to read – but the ending was quite forgettable (I have, literally, forgotten the ending) and I didn’t have any great interest in reading more of the series – but I will, since I already have Crown of Midnight. Maybe it’ll pick up, but I do wish Celaena didn’t talk like a twenty-first century American high school student. It jars with the fantasy setting and, while I guess it’s meant to make her sound like a smart-mouthed, sassy assassin, it just didn’t work. (Read in May 2017)

I have previously read two books by Caine, both the first of a series: Ill Wind – first in the Weather Wardens series – which I absolutely loved; and Glass Houses – first in the Morganville Vampires series – which I liked but, I confess, I’m less enthusiastic for stories in which vampires are creatures of cruelty, horror and ugliness. I know, I know. I hoped that Working Stiff would be more in the vein of Ill Wind – both of them being for adults, after all – but I wasn’t that engaged by the premise or the protagonist. I’m not sure why, it just didn’t ‘tickle my fancy’, so to speak, though it was a good urban fantasy novel.

The first book in the Revivalist series is about what you’d imagine, based on the title and the series name: people being brought back from the dead. These aren’t zombies, though; they’re just very reliant on a drug that was developed by a powerful pharmaceutical company. This reliance means that it’s lucrative on the black market – and someone from inside the company is doing just that: using a funeral home to inject the deceased, bringing them back to life then charging their family an arm and a leg to keep them that way. Not only that, but the company itself has started killing its employees and injecting them, to ensure their life-long loyalty.

Bryn Davis has just started working at the funeral home and she needs this job, but after she discovers what’s really going on her life becomes cheap. The company investigator, Patrick McCallister, is on the scene to stop the trafficking but too late for Bryn. His only choice is to leave her dead or bring her back to life with the drug: and a plan to use her to continue the operation at the funeral home, so that they can track down all the people who had been brought back to life. This turns into a battle against the company itself. (Read in April 2017)

I confess, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Captive Prince (Berkley Books, 2013) is interesting, with some fraught political machinations and satisfying tension, but I didn’t feel that this novel was as darkly, dangerously erotic in the writing of it as it is meant to be, in the setting. Pacat was either holding back or decided that verisimilitude isn’t all that necessary.

It’s about a warrior prince who is betrayed by his half-brother, sent as a pleasure slave to a northern country, Vere, where such things are de rigueur. There, he ends up a slave to Prince Laurent and gets caught up in their own political throne-snatching plans. I labelled this book ‘erotic romance’, and the publisher has likewise labelled it ‘romance’ rather than ‘fantasy’, but aside from some daring displays of men overpowering other men and raping them (Vere’s idea of entertainment for the aristocracy – a kind of sexual gladiator ring), I don’t recall any real romance or eroticism. It should be more memorable than that! But I liked it well enough, for all that it’s short and could have gone much further in its world-building. I’m undecided regarding reading more – and it doesn’t help that I can’t remember much that happened here! (Read in February 2017)

A Taste of Blood Wine (Titan Books, 2013) is quite unlike anything else I’ve read in the paranormal sub-genre of speculative fiction. This one is historical fiction as well as fantasy, and has the length and breadth that I enjoy – no swift pacing or too-sketchy character building here! The story is odd, though, a mix of quite riveting and 80s kitsch. There are moments of Dracula and others of conventional paranormal romance, which actually worked quite well. A vampire villain who is almost impossible to defeat brings it all together and drives the story forward. And the violence and darkness that strike when you least expect it give it the weight of history, that same quality that books about World War I or II have.

I should mention what it’s about, shouldn’t I. Charlotte Neville is the middle of three sisters; she is the quiet one, the one who has dedicated herself to helping her father, a scientist, in his research. And she’s good at it, too: it’s 1923 and she isn’t allowed to go to university herself (or maybe her father won’t let her go). She’s upset when he gets a new assistant, Karl, who both disturbs her and obsesses her. Karl is a vampire, an immortal, looking for a way to kill a vampire, but instead he falls in love with Charlotte and the two embark on a secret love affair. There’s more to it than that, of course. This is gothic horror – and gothic romance – of a kind that blurs genres, making it both more interesting and somewhat unsatisfying. Hard to put my finger on it. (Read in May 2017)

In a large, elegant yet imposing Victorian house in the seaside town of Brighton, England, several women live in hiding: hiding from the pain of the past, from people, from life, from the truth of their lives. Recent arrivals, it is months before they even meet the people living in the other flats. Yet when they do, they rediscover much that they had lost: purpose, laughter, confidence, a sense of belonging.

Georgie has followed her partner, architect Simon, to Brighton to avoid a six-month separation – not that he was super interested in her decision, either way. But having quit her librarian job and rented out their house to a couple of teachers, she’s here in Brighton with high hopes and plenty of enthusiasm. With no job and a tense, stressed boyfriend dealing with protesters to the new hotel development, and a sense of impending strife, Georgie embarks on a new career: freelance writer. She wouldn’t have been able to predict that this would put her in direct conflict with Simon, especially when she’s sent to interview the protesters and comes to take their side.

Across the hall, Charlotte lives alone, hiding from everything and everyone. Having lost her baby, Kate, a week after her birth, Charlotte has made little attempt to do anything but indulge in her grief. Her ex-husband has moved on, but after being accused of trying to snatch another woman’s baby, Charlotte transferred to the Brighton office of her legal firm, where everyone is much too friendly and involved than she’d like. When the company decides that its employees will take part in a community outreach program, connecting to the elderly, Charlotte has an idea that will help her stay within her comfort zone: having met the elderly Frenchwoman who lives in the attic flat, she feels sure Margot will sign up for it. She doesn’t reckon, though, on Margot’s force of nature.

On the ground floor lives Rosa, who left her London job and all her friends behind to escape to Brighton when she discovered the truth about her too-good-to-be-true boyfriend, Max. She’s turned instead to her personal love of cooking and, having taken an intensive six-month course, is now working as sous chef at the local hotel. Work, home, work again: her life has taken on a simple, unfulfilling routine that is shaken when her neighbour, Jo, is suddenly taken to hospital with appendicitis and she has to take care of Jo’s teenage daughter, Beatrice.

These Brighton months will change these women’s lives forever, as old relationships are mended and new ones forged.

The House of New Beginnings is a well-written exploration of the grief and pain experienced by these women, which takes many forms and with diverse causes. Each of the main characters – Georgie, Rosa and Charlotte – are captured with a subtle shift in narrative voice, or tone: from Georgie’s youthful yet inexperienced spunkiness to Rosa’s mature, capable level-headedness to Charlotte’s withdrawn, isolating timidity. Chapters alternate between the different storylines, connecting and overlapping at different points, and while sometimes the sense of time became a bit too vague, the pace is swift and smooth and the story engaging.

Usually, I come away from a book like this with a favourite character, but there are such lovable qualities to all three women – and Margot, the dying Frenchwoman with her ‘harem’ of handsome young studs across town – that I could not possibly pick one. It is light on the romance front – The House of New Beginnings is about individuals forging new relationships and dealing with painful memories and difficult situations, as a kind of mature coming-of-age story – but there is love in each woman’s happily-ever-after. While I didn’t find it a particularly thought-provoking novel, nor one that offered any new or fresh perspectives on these themes, the gentle, empathetic way Diamond handles each of her female characters helped make them endearing, believable and sympathetic. It touches very lightly on a social justice issue, relating to women’s rights, and on gender roles – not enough to satisfy this reader, but enough to give it an edge. It is, primarily, a story of overcoming loss and developing an inner strength, and in that sense it is a very successful one.

Ava and Avery are a bonded couple from Kaya, a land where ancient magic ensures that, once bonded, one cannot live without the other. So when Avery is killed while on a mission to assassinate the evil queen of Pirenti, the northern country with which they have been at war for as long as anyone can remember, Ava is expected to die as well. But she does not, she lives on, though with only half a soul. Vengeance guides her back to Pirenti where, two years later, disguised as a boy called Avery, she is caught by the second prince, Ambrose, and sentence to life on the prison island. But when their ship is wrecked in a storm, Ambrose and Ava must work together to survive. In the process, despite their vast differences, a friendship develops. That friendship soon grows into love, even with Ambrose believing Avery is a boy – when their secrets come out, can their new-found connection survive? Is it possible to love your enemy, or love at all without betraying the man who took half your soul with him into death?

I have several problems with this book. First off, Avery is marketed as ‘adult fantasy’ but I cannot in good conscience call it anything other than Young Adult, despite the ‘adult themes’ and excessively violent, often gruesome scenes that occur. It’s in the adolescent tone, the way the characters speak, especially. It’s not just that they – well, the main character, Ava/Avery, in particular – sound so immature, it’s that words like “whatever” and “gross” belong more to badly written teen fanfiction than published adult fantasy. That might make me sound like a snob, but it’s not that – you write a novel set in another world, a fantasy world, which has its own, decidedly foreign, cultures. You cannot then make your characters sound like cliches from Clueless and hope that your fantasy world be taken seriously. The culture that created such colloquialisms as ‘whatever’ is not part of this world, and the effect is incredibly jarring. My ability to suspend disbelief was too often hampered by such lazy writing.

The writing is also lazy in the world-building. This was perhaps the biggest flaw of the novel. The details of this world just never quite made sense, or weren’t adequately explained. Geography, as well, was out of whack. Pirenti is a northern country perhaps geographically akin to Russia or Canada; in the north are the ‘ice caps’, which appear to be a permanent, year-round hostile environment. Yet, at the same latitude is the prison island, which is described as a jungle. How does that work? While we’re on the prison isle, world-building gaffes abound within the secret ‘village’ of escapee Kayan prisoners – it’s not the incredible cliffside dwellings carved out of marble that they’ve brought from a nearby quarry that I struggled with, believe it or not, but the fact that they have glass in their windows, luxurious apartments (even for unwanted guests) and eat things like cheese. This place is home to Kayans who, they say, escaped the Pirenti prison. No one knows they’re there and they can’t leave. They have no animals or livestock (so, no milk for cheese), and if they want to remain undetected they would have to be careful of the amount of noise they make (quarrying for rock with no tools?? or do they use their sole Warder’s magic – it’s never explained what these people are actually capable of) and of smoke, say from a kiln or other super hot oven? Where do they get their clothes from, the materials for everything? All highly unlikely.

Distances and timeframes were also liberally dispensed with when required by the author to maintain her swift pacing. It all reminded me of cheesy action movies, as if they were used as the model for many of the scenes – especially the fight scenes. Plot holes abound here, too, such as when Ava escapes from a dungeon, taking not the guard’s sword but his bow and arrows! A dungeon guard, carrying bow and arrows?? In the highly militaristic and violent country of Pirenti, they would know better.

I could keep going, but I think you get the drift. Really, though, this is a character-driven romantic fantasy, so I should be discussing the characters. When she isn’t talking like a rather lame contemporary western teenager, Ava is solidly drawn and has some charisma, as does Ambrose. The other two main characters here are Ambrose’s older brother, Thorne, and his wife Roselyn. All four alternate in first person narrative voice, and this is handled quite deftly. Roselyn is a nicely distinctive character, and Thorne is clearly a different person from Ambrose. The problem for me lies in the way domestic violence is handled. While it’s wrapped up in a broader theme of power and women’s rights, and while the denouement ensures that Thorne’s violence towards his wife is not rewarded by the author, Roselyn’s quiet, steadfast and loving loyalty to Thorne remains a distinct problem. While one fictional character should not a message make, Roselyn’s refusal to leave her husband or do anything but love him makes her a difficult character to respect. That said, the characters are the strength of this novel, that and the swift pacing.

Pirenti is a violent country, so the violence does have some context, but it was a bit excessive and rather unrealistic at times. (Also, marble stains something shocking – how do you have a “killing room” lined in marble and keep it spotless?) Not being afraid of spilling blood and tearing minor characters apart does not make for a more mature novel or more sophisticated ideas. Rather, it becomes too much and, then, too ludicrous. My ability to suspend disbelief – necessary in all fiction, television and film, to varying degrees, but especially in fantasy – was tested time and time again, and often failed under the weight of plotholes, inconsistencies, over-the-top violence and I have no idea what was going on with Ambrose at the end. The romance aspect fell completely flat there (plus, it had finally started to drag by then).

A disappointing foray into a newish Australian voice in fantasy fiction, for me.

The Beast’s Garden is set in Berlin from late 1938 until just after the end of the war. A loose retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, “The Singing, Springing Lark” (itself a variant of the more well-known “The Beauty and the Beast”), the combination of setting and love story makes for an often tense, harrowing reading experience. The main protagonist, Ava Falkenhorst, is a native Berliner, her father a German psychoanalyst and professor, her mother a Spanish singer who died giving birth. She has two older half-sisters, Bertha and Monika, but she was raised by her mother’s best friend, Tante Thea, whose son Rupert was born within hours of Ava. Both Ava and Rupert are musicians, Rupert playing trumpet and piano, Ava singing in a low contralto. Their favourite music is jazz and blues – Billie Holiday and other American artists – and the world seems bright and full of promise, and not even the rise of Hitler is taken all that seriously in Ava’s artistic, well-educated circle.

Then, Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), the Night of Broken Glass, when her friend’s family is harassed, their apartment destroyed, and they are forced to leave, taking shelter in Ava’s family home. It seems, to Ava, like the whole world has suddenly gone mad. It is also on Crystal Night that she meets a young Nazi officer, Leo von Löwenstein, who draws her as a man but repels her as representative of all she considers wrong in Germany. But when her father is arrested for sending letters to warn influential people in other countries about what is happening in Germany, Ava’s only recourse is to turn to Leo for help, no matter the cost.

This sets up the remainder of the story, and for a book that lasts the duration of World War II, there’s a lot more that happens. Forsyth’s Berlin is carefully, authentically recreated, from the glorious old buildings – many commandeered by the Nazis – and Tiergarten (or “Beast’s Garden”), to the rubble and ruin it is all reduced to in the air raids. That juxtaposition of glory, grandeur and beauty against the destruction of war is painfully poignant and all too tragic. Knowing, as you do when you start reading, how the war ends, how Hitler survives to the end, and what happens to the political prisoners, the homosexuals, the disabled and the Jews, not to mention neighbouring nations, there were times when this knowledge aided the tense, frightening atmosphere, yet it also made me fear for an unhappy ending for Ava and Leo.

While Ava’s perspective dominates, brief scenes from Rupert’s point of view within Buchenwald concentration camp – and, later, a few from Leo and Rupert’s sister Jutta – flesh out and enhance the narrative while also providing that harrowing, intimate view of the inside of a concentration camp. You only need these scenes to be brief – longer and the impact would be lost – but it also serves to show that side of the war within Germany. Everything in the story takes place within that nation, mostly in Berlin, and the contrasts between the abject poverty, homelessness and violence endured by the Jews, the gypsies and even many Germans, and the opulent wealth and excessive luxuries enjoyed by the upper class, particularly the Nazi elite, is sickening. So, too, is the waste of human life, the mass exterminations and the sheer cruelty shown to people the Nazis called “sub-human”.

Early on, Ava reads her niece – Bertha’s young daughter – the fairy tale “The Singing, Springing Lark” and remembers her father reading it to her. When he first asked her what she thought it was about, she told him it was about never giving up. Later, she told him it was about being brave, and when she was older she thought it was about true love. This captures the essence of The Beast’s Garden well: it is definitely about never giving up, about being brave and about true love, and makes you ponder the idea that these must surely be some of the most important things in life. You could add, though, that it is also about being compassionate (caring for and about others) and about standing up for what is right (which, granted, looks different to different people).

That last one is tricky, because from Hitler’s perspective, he was doing what was right – just as Donald Trump (who has often been compared to Hitler, including by Holocaust survivors) also believes in what he is standing up for (or, at least, his supporters do – I’m never entirely sure whether Trump believes anything he says or is just too far-gone in the well of Spin). Forsyth provides balanced insights into the ideological and psychological aspects of Germany’s people at this time, presenting the different attitudes and showing just how lacking in unity they really were. A great many of the characters in the novel, according to Forsyth’s very interesting Afterword, were real people involved in the underground resistance movement. I knew of the White Rose already, from using the film Sophie Scholl in one of my English classes a couple of years ago, and I have long been curious about the German perspective and what else was going on. The French Resistance is well-known, but the German one has long fallen into obscurity – which is a shame. Ava is representative of the many who helped shelter and help Jews, and wanted to stop the war, though they were indeed too few to do all that much against the well-oiled Nazi machine. The obstacles, the price of resistance, the despair and the horror are all captured by Forsyth – she has done a wonderful job of humanising the Germans (even those who supported the Nazis) as well as the Jews, and creating a true ethical and moral crisis. It’s this aspect of the story that really gives it depth, clarity and realism.

While I was worried, at first, that Ava’s character seemed a little too similar to cliched heroines that I’ve read before, and that the romance would devolve into formulaic lines, I was pleased (and relieved) when it shifted to focus more on the war, on resisting the Nazis and trying to save their loved ones. The Ava and Leo relationship becomes an anchor throughout, a smoldering, banked fire simply waiting for peace in order to shine to its fullest extent. It is this ‘true love’ they feel for each other – and the love and loyalty that so many other characters show for each other – that emphasises the horrors of this particular war. Towards the end, Forsyth’s experience writing Fantasy novels stands her in good stead: the final scenes (before the epilogue), when Ava attempts a seemingly impossible rescue, are full of tension, brilliantly paced and carefully plotted.

The elements of romance, historical fiction, adventure (that ending) and a responsibility to honour all those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis are all beautifully balanced here in Forsyth’s capable hands. She mentions, at the end of her Afterword, the fear she felt at being able to do it justice, that “I was afraid to fail all those people who suffered so terribly during the seven years of my story. It felt like some kind of responsibility … to do my best to bring their suffering and their heroism to life. To, somehow, bear witness.” (p.437) This is one of the powers of literature, of art in general, and a reason why we should privilege the Arts in all its forms. I would also say that, for someone who wasn’t even born at the time, Kate Forsyth has done a wonderful job at bearing witness, and allowing me the opportunity to feel like I was there, living it. I’m not sure what more I could want from this book.

The last book I read in 2016 was easily one of the best. I had read a short review of this trilogy in the Review section of the Weekend Australian (the Review section is much less right-wing than the newspaper itself, perhaps because it’s mighty difficult to marry conservative values with the confronting and questioning nature of art and literature) some months earlier, ordered this, the first, book, and then forgot all about it. While looking for something to take with me on a beach holiday after Christmas (we went to Byron Bay), I thought this might do the trick – and I was right. I suffer from terrible travel sickness on domestic flights (something to do with the lower altitude, air pressure and the inner ear??), and even though I had my ear plugs, music and was taking a tonne of Travel Calm, I still felt incredibly nauseous, breaking out in a cold sweat and feeling close to vomiting. Usually, I can’t read a thing, nothing can take my mind off how awful I’m feeling and how much concentration it takes not to throw up (I’m not always successful). And yet, Ancillary Justice was up to the challenge – and won. What a fantastic book! It absolutely deserves the praise it received in the review I read, not to mention all three major Science Fiction awards: the Hugo, the Arthur C Clarke and the Nebula (2014).

It will be hard, though, to explain the set-up of this story, because it is beautifully original without being too complicated or esoteric (I’m currently having that problem with another book, Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink). The Radch empire is centuries old and extends across a vast reach of galaxy. Their massive starships are artificial intelligences that not only run, manage, control and monitor absolutely everything on board (there is zero privacy), but also serve as soldiers through their thousands of ancillaries. An ancillary was a human but is no more – their brains are empty things. After being kept in storage in the holds until needed, they are connected to the ship and the ship’s consciousness is thus split into all these different bodies, alongside and within the ship itself. Think of it like a computer tracking through thousands of cameras, able to think different things at the same time. On the ship, the ancillaries are like servants, and they are divided into different levels to match the many floors of the ship. On colonised planets, they are soldiers, spies and servants.

Breq is an ancillary soldier on a mission, a mission of revenge. As a starship, the Justice of Toren, she was blown up. This one ancillary was given last-minute orders and escaped in a pod. Her quest is one which no sane human would attempt, for Breq is going after the ruler of the empire, Anaander Mianaai, who also uses ancillaries to the point that there is no ‘original’ Anaander Mianaai anymore. Not only that, but Justice of Toren, before being destroyed, had discovered a truth that no one else realises: there isn’t just one Anaander Mianaai anymore, one consciousness embodied in many ancillaries, there are two – and they are at war with each other/itself. This split, Breq has worked out, began when Anaander Mianaai ordered a whole planet destroyed as punishment for an attempted assassination: her conscience split over the decision.

As awful as the demise of a whole planet is, it has also given Breq the form of her quest: while the incredible guns used in the attempt were seized – guns that evade detection – one slipped through. It is in pursuit of this one special gun that Breq now finds herself on an ice-bound planet.

There is so much to love and enjoy here, not least of all Breq’s first-person voice. As an artificial intelligence, as the remainder of the Justice of Toren, she is clearly not human, but she is understandable, sympathetic and vastly interesting. She can be quite deadly at times, able to make quick calculations and deductions, and very strong – much stronger than she appears. This is another aspect of the world that is interesting: in the Radch culture, they do not distinguish between men and women, and use the female pronoun for everyone. The actual, biological gender of the people Breq meets is irrelevant to her, not important. But we learn that the ancillary who calls herself Breq is gendered female; others, we never know for sure. The Radch are not particularly evil, intimidating, cruel or vicious. They are, however, superior-minded, and like many worlds, have a very clear idea of what it is to be civilised, and who is to be considered ‘civilised’.

Alongside the exciting space-adventure story lie these thought-provoking ideas, and such is Leckie’s skill at character and world-building, this complex story is rendered entirely clear without being simplified. It was beautifully layered, the backstory – Breq’s story – parcelled out at just the right time, with just the right amount of new information revealed, and by returning to past scenes and events now and again, our understanding is solidified and expanded upon. A wonderful, wonderful story cleverly told – this is going on the favourites list!

The Circle is a perfectly timed book and will be timely for quite some time, ha ha. The question of our right to privacy has long been debated and is not altogether a given – even less so since 9-11. The right to privacy has taken on a new dimension since the world wide web took off and social media became ‘the thing’. While social media can be empowering and has been used to a means to redress a power imbalance (think of those who film police beating someone up, or the Arab Spring), it can also have the reverse effect. Pair this up with the amazing power of the internet – or rather, specific software programs and companies – to track our usage, our spending, our habits etc. in order to ‘better’ or more ‘efficiently’ target us with ‘tailored’ products, and it can seem like the whole world is watching you. (There is the interesting case, in the United States, of the teenage girl who started receiving advertising for baby products; her father, outraged, complained, but it turns out she was pregnant and didn’t even know it – but the companies did. They knew she was pregnant before she did because of the things she was buying, which apparently, women who are pregnant tend to buy. Such is the vast volume of data at their disposal that their algorithms are able to work that kind of thing out.)

When Mae Holland gets a job at The Circle (modelled on Google), she feels giddy and in awe. Sure, it’s in a call centre division, answering customer service emails, but in a company like the Circle, people notice when you prove yourself, and Mae is determined to prove herself. At first, though, it seems that her values and ideals are at odds with the Circle’s: they want total transparency in people’s lives, while she still goes out in a kayak for peace and solitude and, horror of all horrors, doesn’t post about it on social media. Mae mends her ways and becomes a staunch supporter of everything the Circle does and says. But in a company that has eyes and ears everywhere, who is the strange, enigmatic man who slips in and about, undetected? The name he told her doesn’t show in the system, and Mae soon doubts that he works there at all, but it’s not long before she realises that he may be planning something. So when he asks for her help, Mae is faced with a momentous decision.

As someone who is not on her mobile phone constantly, or who uses her social media accounts with any frequency (I visit maybe once a week, and post even less), and as a teacher who is constantly in competition with the distraction of mobile phones (or rather, their internet connectivity) at a period in our civilisation in which the boundaries between work/study and social time seem ever more blurred by users, I found the Circle and its creed disturbing, even frightening, but all too real. The Circle represents the kind of oppression – through the denial of a right to privacy – that the people not only buy into, but enforce. In effect, people police themselves, a kind of brainwashing. It all comes down to the power of language, and the power of public relations (the other name for PR is ‘propaganda’).

Mae is something of a frustrating heroine because she’s not very bright. She’s easily impressed, and other people’s arguments – in particular, the people who run the Circle – completely blindside her. Mae represents the vast blob of humanity in this: she is the everyman, a simple, ordinary person with modest ambitions and modest intelligence. It doesn’t make for easy reading, in the sense that she makes you, the reader, feel more superior – and I’m not someone who is all that keen on feeling that way.

In true literary dystopian fashion, this has an ending that you probably won’t like, but it is the right ending for the story. While the understanding of dystopian fiction, as a genre, has been skewed by the slew of Young Adult adventure novels – in which the dystopia serves as setting and premise, but which aren’t, really, dystopian stories in and of themselves (more like coming-of-age stories for young teens with a message of hope and freedom through collaboration, resilience, perseverance and rebellion against an oppressive regime) – really, the dystopian genre is concerned with a satiric representation of authority and socio-political commentary. They’re not meant to be thrillers or romances or coming of age stories or exciting adventures. They’re meant to be dark, troubling thought experiments that emphasise flaws in our political structure, social values and to show us where we might end up should we follow a certain path. Here, Eggers has taken on Google’s vast reach, the influence of social media and the troubling infringements on privacy through laws that are passed with little fanfare, all in the name of protecting us and freedom – an irony that is best served through the satirical nature of dystopic work – and his ending is apt. As such, I value this novel for its ideas and the disturbingly realistic depiction of twenty-first century westerners, even though it is at times slow and Mae herself is rather too realistic for comfort. But that’s the point, surely: you shouldn’t get too comfortable, reading a dystopian novel.

Read in September 2016.

The Children of Men by PD James
Vintage Books 2006 (1992
Trade Paperback
241 pages
Speculative Fiction; Dystopian Fiction

Finally, finally, I have read – or rather, finished – a PD James book. My first foray was back in, oh, 2007 or ‘8, a colleague lent me one of her detective novels, I don’t remember which one. I couldn’t get into it at all; it had all the traits I struggle with in detective fiction: superficial, cardboard characters whom you never get to know or understand; not enough detail (ironic, isn’t it, in a crime fiction book?); and, therefore, no real interest on my part in the crime or ‘whodunit’. I never finished it, and returned it rather shamefaced and apologetic. But The Children of Men is a completely different kettle of fish. I saw the 2006 film adaptation when it came out and really enjoyed it. While I can’t remember much of it, a few scenes have stuck in my head – enough for me to know that it’s very different to the book. As such, seeing the film first isn’t going to ruin the tension or the ending of the novel which, while first published in 1992, remains timeless in its themes and ideas. and what it has to say about human nature.

It is 2021 and the human race is at crisis point. It has been twenty-five years since a baby was born on Earth, and as Theo’s journal begins, the last baby to be born has just died in a pub brawl. Theodore Faron is a historian at Oxford University, history being a subject that people have lost all interest in. When there are no babies being born, there is no future, so what it the point to it all? People are facing the extinction of centuries of civilisation, everything. Apathy and ennui have set in, not to mention the ghost towns, the depletion of food and the Omega violence. Omegas – named after that last year of babies, Omega – are the last year of babies; now grown up, and having been raised in a pampered way, they have become utterly self-absorbed and, for some at least, have turned into gangs that mete out senseless, ritualistic violence on the unwary.

England responded swiftly, and has more stability than many countries. The Warden of England is a powerful man. He and his Council – Martin Woolvington, Industry and Production; Harriet Marwood, Health, Science and Recreation; Felicia Rankin, Home Afairs; and Carl Ingleback, Minister for Justice and State Security – manage the whole country with utter authority. The Warden’s authority is underlined by his promise to the nation: Freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom. One of his measures is to use the Isle of Man as a prison, where anyone caught committing a crime, even petty crimes, are sent for life. Another aspect of this new England is the Quietas: state-sanctioned and supported euthanasia.

The Warden (or dictator) is Xan Lyppiatt, and he is Theo’s cousin. Theo spent nearly every summer holiday, as a boy, at Xan’s home, a grand estate called Woolcombe – now it is a nursing home. And many years later, Theo spent two years as a kind of adviser to the Warden, sitting in on Council meetings, ostensibly to offer his insights. [It’s a truism not acknowledged anymore that a history degree – and many other Arts degrees – will equip you for analytical roles; it’s true, historians make amazing analysts, and people with philosophy degrees are strong CEOs. The problem, as always, likes in marketing.]

It is due to this connection that Theo is approached by a small group of revolutionaries, who want him to meet with the Warden and put forward their demands. They want the transportation of criminals to the Man Penal Colony stopped, and better conditions for the prisoners – the island is like a gulag, ruled by thugs where violence and starvation are rife. Escape is believed to be impossible, but one young man, Henry, managed it. He sought out his sister, Miriam, and before he was arrested again and executed, he told her about life there. The other demand is an end to the Quietas, which they say is performed against people’s will. Theo is doubtful, but attends one: a busload of old people are driven to a pier, put on a boat and then the boat is sunk at sea. What Theo witnesses shakes him to the core: one of the women, someone he had known for years, resisted and tried to escape her fate. She is clubbed, and Theo, in trying to assist her, is also beaten.

But it is one of the other women, Julian, who draws Theo to the group like a magnet. She is beautiful and intelligent, but one of her hands is deformed – this deformity excludes her from the regular sterility check-ups that ‘healthy’ people must undergo. She is married to one of the other group members, Rolf. Aside from this couple and Miriam, whose trade before Omega was as a midwife, there are two others: Luke, a priest, and an older man, Gascoigne. Theo goes ahead with the meeting with Xan, though it is as futile as he predicted, but there is a much deeper secret driving the group than human rights: Julian is the first woman in twenty-five years to be pregnant. A deeply religious (Christian) woman, Julian does not want the protection of the Warden; she doesn’t want hospitals and strangers at her side. She wants a hut in the forest, and just her group by her. But hiding her, protecting her from gangs of Omegas and keeping her from Xan’s knowledge is no easy feat in a country where he controls everything and knows everything.

This is a fascinating story of humanity with a premise that is both compelling and terrifying. It’s interesting just how scary the idea of ‘withering’ really is: of just slowly dying out, and with full knowledge, of so many people facing the knowledge of the extinction of the human race. Perhaps it’s just me, but the knowing is frightening (though I’m not on the side of “ignorance is bliss”; I acknowledge the fear but think it’s worse to lie to yourself or maintain stupidity). The sense of ennui (a French word meaning “a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement”) pervades the novel; it’s always in the background, thanks to Theo so thoughtfully describing the situation in his journal, which takes up the first several chapters, providing much-needed exposition. The atmospheric quality of this apathetic despair makes the tension and fear around Julian’s pregnancy all the more vivid.

Being a novel of and about western civilisation, Christianity and questions of God are throughout – Theo is a calm non-believer, and Julian’s religious fervour is one of her less attractive features. Below the level of discussion and debate, though, the novel alludes to the birth of Christ in its ending; yet, because of what Theo does in the denouement (and I am trying hard to hold back from spoilers), it seemed to me that James was writing a clever critique of humanity, and the connection between power and religion. Of doing ‘wrong’ things for the ‘right’ reasons. Of the force of symbolism and the compromises we make for the sake of bigger things, or rather, the things we believe in. And, as in all good literature, it doesn’t offer answers but raises discomfiting questions, emphasises ideas that many of us don’t like to dwell on – not least of which is, do we deserve a second chance?

This short novel is a super-quick read and seems hardly dated at all, perhaps because it is more about humanity and colonisation than space travel or aliens. Everything and anything can be viewed as a representation or allusion or allegory, and The Word for World is Forest is just as easily about what humans have already done to each other as it is about our potential wrongdoing in the future.

In this futuristic world, the Earth has been depleted of resources and other planets have been colonised for their resources. Or perhaps ‘colonised’ isn’t quite accurate here: there are outposts and small settlements, but our purpose there isn’t really to colonise but to exploit. Or maybe that’s the point: the two are so closely related as to be interchangeable. There are certain rules in place, and Earth’s humans’ sense of their own superiority is carefully sheltered within this moral righteousness. On Athshea, a green, densely forested planet, they are harvesting trees and using the natives to do most of the work. These small-statured, furry green beings, which the colonisers call “creechies”, are in all reality slaves, and ones that the resident humans have no respect for. They aren’t violent, so one Athshean, Selver, is the exception. When his wife is killed by Captain Davidson, one of the camp leaders and an incredibly bigoted man, Selver reacts so violently Davidson almost kills him to get him to stop. He is nursed back to health by another human man, Captain Raj Lyubov, who is looked down on by his peers for being ‘soft’ on the natives.

Selver’s plan goes further than revenge: he wants to stop the felling of trees and get the humans or – ‘yumens’ – off the planet entirely, but to do that, he must become a god and lead his people into a new world of violence and killing. In short, they must become more like the humans in order to defeat them, attacking and destroying and killing. As such, will they lose their true natures? What is the price of peace and is it worth paying? Such are the philosophical questions raised by Le Guin, but the difference here is that the Athsheans aren’t human, and don’t think or behave the same way we do. The clash of cultures, thought processes and values is quite clear and, I found, invigorating. The story might feel a bit ‘done’ for some readers, based on the books and films that have come after its 1972 release, but I think there’s still much here to offer, and a critique on humanity that will probably never be irrelevant.

Harry Potter needs no introduction, but this play needs some context. It is set several years after the events of the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Harry and Ginny’s children are getting ready to start a new school year at Hogwart’s, alongside Ron and Hermione’s children. The story revolves around young Albus, now eleven years old and embarking on his first year away from home. Albus is worried, soon with just cause: to the shock of everyone, he is sorted into Slytherin house – and comes to love it.

But Albus is no Tom Riddle or Draco Malfoy – he’s a Potter-Weasley and adventure is never far away, nor good intentions. He becomes determined to save Cedric (he of the incredibly tragic ending in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) by going back in time – more than once, causing disturbing changes in the present.

This is a wonderful coming-of-age story for young Albus, who is marginalised and judged as somewhat lacking by others. His new best friend is Scorpius Malfoy, son of Harry’s old nemesis and also a disappointment to his family: Scorpius is a lovely kid, but not appreciated for who his real nature. It is also the story of Harry as a father, a loving father but a father who is floundering, struggling to connect with his youngest son and making some big mistakes. His hero status drops quite a bit, and you see the flawed human that is within us all.

While it is, in many ways, a homage to the novels, The Goblet of Fire in particular, it offers some wonderful new characters and a less polished glimpse into this world of witches and wizards. Harry is tarnished, a middle-aged bureaucrat who – perhaps because he never had a real father himself – is making a hash at connecting to Albus. Other beloved characters from the original series, now older and tired and less patient (that is to say, typical adults who frown upon the kinds of ideas, decisions and antics they themselves engaged in as children), seem more human than ever, which nicely balances the fantastical elements of the world and the story. It also does a sound job of using new crises to build strong relationships between friends, family and old enemies.

I loved this story, this play, but gosh it made me miss the full-length novels! It was just so damn short! A novella, really, in terms of length and how fast you can read it (give yourself a day or two, depending on distractions). Because it’s a play it reads super fast, and I have always loved Rowling’s writing and how she fleshes out her characters, settings and situations. Jack Thorne has done an admirable job here, and as I loosely string these pitiful sentences together, I am overtaken by an intense urge to re-read it straight away.

Slated is quite simple in premise at first, but a story which becomes more interesting at the end when it takes a new turn and makes you wonder afresh. To be ‘slated’ is to have your mind wiped clean – as clean as a slate, that old piece of slate tile that children used to learn to write on, a long time ago – as punishment for some crime. It only works on people up to a certain age (sixteen? Seventeen? I forget), but after being slated they must stay in the hospital for some time, learning to walk and talk again, building new memories. The slated wear a Levo on their wrist, a device that, connected to a chip in the brain and their pulse, measures their levels of fear, anxiety, excitement and will make them pass out if it drops to a certain level. It also tracks them, and they cannot be removed – doing so would kill them.

Kyla has been slated. She doesn’t know why, and it’s not something you ask, but everyone assumes kids who have been slated have done something horrible, like murder or terrorism. Certainly, in this era of frequent terrorist attacks and surveillance in a country ruled by an authoritarian regime, punishments are severe. Kyla is not her original name but the one she has been given; she is also given a new family. She is already a bit different from the other Slateds, though: she draws, with exceptional skill, and she recovered quickly from the operation. Later in the story, she discovers something else that troubles her: at a moment of pure terror, and another of white-hot rage, she doesn’t shut down – she is even able to exercise violence. Her Levo should have instantly rendered her unconscious, but it didn’t. She also has troubling dreams – but are they dreams, or are they memories that have survived the slating process?

The first half of this book was a little … quiet, for me, but at some point it picks up and you start wondering more and more. There’s a lot that is unexplained, but what is is intriguing and thrilling. I’m not entirely sure where it’s going, but it seems like a fairly standard YA dystopian, in that the setting is dystopian but the story itself is really a thriller, and a coming-of-age story. Whether it has any deeper socio-political commentary or is responding to anything beyond nonconformity and terrorism, I’m unconvinced at this point. But it is nicely written and the characters are well drawn. Dr Lysander, in particular, is an interesting character – so ominous and frightening at the start, but is she actually kind-hearted and compassionate? I’m not sure if I’ll continue on with the other two books, Fractured and Shattered.

I don’t often bother commenting on books I don’t finish, as usually it’s more of a case of not being in the right mood for something, or too much happening in life and I forget what’s going on to the point where I’d have to start from the beginning again. In the case of I Am Number Four, however, I know I’ll never pick it up again and attempt to finish it. It’s so dreadfully written, the narrator’s voice is eye-rollingly lame and, even worse, creepy, and the plot has too many holes to survive. It’s a sinking ship, and one I wouldn’t want to rescue. And can I just repeat that the narrator, the ‘hero’, is super creepy? Ugh, the way he ‘charms’ the girls, *shudder*.

In 2002, after being away for much of his life, Kip returns alone to his family’s farm in Mole Creek, Tasmania. His mother is dead, his father – suffering from dementia – living in a nursing home, and his wife and young son are back in Amsterdam with her own, dying father. Only Squid, the old farm hand, remains on the property, but Kip avoids him. He is here with a purpose: to find his brother Tommy, who disappeared when Kip was nine years old, and atone.

I am automatically drawn to books written in or about places, people and events in Tasmania, my home state. I love this island, it has a tight hold of my heart, and after many years away I was drawn back as surely as fate. It is a rich, diverse landscape, roughened by harsh histories, home to the Gothic of its British colonial heritage as much as it is to an ancient Indigenous legacy – I can well imagine that it is much like Briton itself, with its older history of Celts and Saxons and Druids. It is an island with a tangible sense of time and timelessness: a paradox that makes utter sense when you live here. And because so much of it is unmapped, unknowable and frankly downright eery, it is ripe for imaginative work in the British tradition (I am still waiting for an Indigenous-authored novel but I don’t know of one, and being of British ancestry myself, any understanding I feel I have of their stories and relationship with the land is automatically tainted and an unwanted act of appropriation. Such is the fraught discourse we find ourselves enmeshed in here).

The Better Son is Queensland-born Johnson’s second novel and her sense of place is vividly realised. The cave in the book, Kubla (after Coleridge’s poem Kubla Kahn), is modelled on the nearby Marakoopa cave in the Karst National Park, though there is a cave called Kubla as well. Marakoopa was first discovered by two brothers, James and Harry Byard, who kept it a secret for several years until it was opened for tourism. There is another famous cave nearby, called King Solomon’s Cave, which I visited on Boxing Day last year. It doesn’t have the ginormous cathedral caves of Marakoopa but it is beautiful, splendid and amazing all the same. Johnson says that her novel is a “fictional fusion of the two ideas: one of the world’s most incredible caves and two small boys” who keep its discovery a secret. The small town of Mole Creek in Tasmania’s north – not far from where I grew up – is rich farming land, but it sits on porous limestone country where sinkholes can open up quite suddenly and randomly. Underneath, it is an extensive cave network millions of years old. The idea of disappearing into a sinkhole or getting lost in a cave system is an aspect of Tasmanian Gothic, itself part of Australian Gothic – think Picnic at Hanging Rock as a good example.

Kip’s story begins in the summer of 1952, and it is one of the strengths of Johnson’s writing that he and his family are so believable. Perhaps his father, Harold, verges on cliché, but as an archetype veteran of WWII as well as an angry farmer, he rings true. Kip’s mother, Jess, is educated and loving and the only thing standing between Kip and the father who seems to hate him. His older brother Tommy, on the other hand, is beloved by Harold and can do no wrong. Still, the brothers are close, and the adventure of descending (by knotted rope) into a vast lightless cave and then exploring it is the highlight of Kip’s summer. It ends in tragedy, though, when twelve-year-old Tommy decides to explore a small tunnel and is never seen again.

If the characters are tautly drawn, the landscape is represented as a slumbering, other-worldly entity, breathtakingly inhuman and utterly uncaring, yet with a presence both awe-inspiring and ominous.

They picked their way through a forest of stone. Stalagmites connected with the stalactites from the ceiling to form giant columns as tall as city buildings; others, the height of men, were like the frozen soldiers of some ancient army. Kip held his candle high above his head, but the darkness devoured the light. [p.36]

The boys name it Kubla, after the Coleridge poem their mother taught them, and the parallels between the poem and Kip’s story are made clear throughout the novel. The depiction of the porous, fragile landscape holding its secrets close is used by Johnson as an analogy for the troubled family, an analogy that is both fitting and, at times, spelt out too often. Herein lies the overall weakness of Johnson’s novel: it tells more than it shows. There is a distinct “accounting” style to the storytelling as it faithfully follows Kip, after the tragedy and into adulthood, but without the detail and scenes that made his childhood so engaging to read about. Kip is sent to boarding school, then he goes to university, then he studies insects, then he goes to the Netherlands for his Ph.D to work with saving the tulips, then he meets Isle and so on. This recounting of Kip’s life is woven amongst a recounting of Jess and Squid, who become lovers until her death. It’s a short novel; I actually think it would have been stronger if those later years were handled differently, perhaps with clearer, lengthier scenes and less telling. It felt rushed, those chapters, as if the author were just accounting for those lost years until she could get Kip back to Mole Creek.

The final scene only makes the previous years feel even more rushed: Kip’s descent into Kubla and hunt for his brother’s body is nicely drawn out and tempered. His psychological descent into childhood – which verges on insanity – feels true as well as tragic. It’s an emotional journey through the dark caves with their hidden, breath-taking beauty, a journey that provides Kip, now fifty-nine, a chance to decide whether he will be forever formed by what happened fifty years ago, or if he will break free of his own guilt, the sense of responsibility that has shackled him for so long. Ultimately, it is Squid who saves him from himself and reminds Kip of his own nine-year-old son: the idea that life keeps going and you have a choice as to what kind of person you will be, and that your responsibilities change with time. Now, as a father himself, he has the opportunity to do a much better job of it than Harold did with him.

Squid is easily the best character here, though I did like Kip and Jess as well. My husband read this book at the same time (we have our own copies – we treat our books differently so it’s best that way!) and Squid was his favourite character as well. Through Squid we get another perspective – he is a third-person focaliser for some chapters, providing us with greater insights and details after Kip leaves Tasmania. Squid is a ‘salt of the earth’ character, a quiet, patient, loving man who looks after the farmland just as tenderly as he cares for Jess after her diagnosis. He provides a more politically-charged glimpse into farming practices – spraying versus using plants and insects as natural insecticides (which to him is common sense, while Kip works so hard convincing people of its worth), and the damaging forestry and land-clearing practices still carried out in the state today. So it’s easy to like Squid, as our philosophies seem to align.

The Better Son is a wonderful story that, for all it felt rushed in the telling and, at times, a bit obvious, shows the sickening damage that some parenting can have on children, with far-reaching repercussions. The secrets themselves, which poison Kip’s soul, are only a side-effect of the family dynamics, yet Johnson is careful not to make Harold an inhuman villain. At its peak, it made me cry, and that cannot happen without an emotional connection to characters and a story that is believable and poignant.

It’s that time again: time to scramble up some reviews of books read over the last year that I never had time (or brain energy) to discuss before. I even have a couple from 2015 that I didn’t get around to, oh dear. This is all part of my pledge-to-self to review every book I read, which I cling to stubbornly, even though it gets harder and harder to keep up.

When I reviewed Herman Koch’s 2014 novel, Summer House with Swimming Pool, fellow reviewer Brona noted that my description of that book mirrored her own to The Dinner, Koch’s first successful book (and first to be translated into English). Now that I’ve read both, I would have to concur that they share similar themes and ideas, from the compelling yet morally unpleasant male narrator to the confronting scenario of protective fatherhood versus wanton violence.

The Dinner, in ‘real time’, takes place over the course of a dinner at a fancy restaurant, but within this present-day setting – structured over a five-course meal – the narrator, Paul, takes us back through recent events so that we slowly build a fuller understanding of just what the tension and undercurrents are at this dinner. Paul and his wife, Claire, are dining with Paul’s politician brother, Serge, and his wife, Babette. Serge is a virtual shoe-in for next Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and something of a celebrity – incurring Paul’s annoyance and envy. The last thing Serge would want on the eve of an election is a scandal, but that’s exactly what is brewing: a scandal centred around Serge and Paul’s sons, Rick and Michel, and the murder of a homeless woman.

This social realism story is a deceptively simple one: it’s not about solving a mystery so much as delving into some pretty dark neuroses at both the individual level – Paul, we slowly discover, has some kind of mysterious (unrevealed) condition and is prone to moments of violence – and at a social one. How we care for each other, the divisions of class and wealth, expectations of parents and children, how we interact and socialise. The ethical dilemma at the heart of this book gives it great thrust, and is sure to unsettle and disturb any reader – thus providing much food for thought.

I actually hesitated in selecting the Australian flag here, rather than the U.S. one – it often feels as if Carey has turned his back on his birth country, but then along comes a novel like Amnesia (which, to my more cynical mind, seems like a book to prove this point) and Carey’s complete Australianness becomes apparent. With its connection to politics, the law, ethics and forgotten 20th century history, Amnesia reminded me a bit of the ABC television show, Rake. The main character, Felix Moore, is a similarly rabble-rousing trouble-maker, fallen out of favour, though not a womaniser or scoundrel of that ilk. Moore is one of the last investigative journalists in the country (again, my cynical mind argues that Australian journalism has disappeared almost completely, though certain current affairs programs, particularly on the ABC, continue to soldier on as best they can).

However, Amnesia is really the story of Gabrielle (Gaby) Baillieux, a hacker from Melbourne whose own mother, Celine, was a baby born from the rape of a woman by a U.S. soldier stationed in Australia during World War II. This incident is a good example of the chilly, tense tone between the two countries, as Felix explains an American (CIA) involvement in getting rid of Gough Whitlam in the 70s and installing the conservative prime minister, Robert Menzies – all because Whitlam cancelled a deal between the two countries that enabled the US to continue using Australian territory for some of its Cold War operations. How much of this is true I don’t personally know, but it’s highly plausible. If it is true, it fits in exactly with the premise of the novel, as put forward by the title: that we forget these things, that as a country we have deliberately chosen to forget, making historical ‘fact’ slide into myth and then disappear entirely.

This is all stirred up when Gaby uses a worm to infect the computer systems that operate the private American prisons – and, by connection, the Australian ones too (a dig at the continued out-sourcing of things like prisons to private, for-profit corporations is ever-present), thus releasing all the prisoners. On the run and in hiding, Gaby’s mother Celine and an old friend, Woody Townes – a wealthy (but seemingly dodgy) businessman – hire Felix to write the book on Gaby. He barely gets to meet her, though, instead dumped on an isolated island in a river to transcribe old-fashioned cassette tapes and make sense of both Gaby and Celine’s version of the past – and each other.

In many ways, Amnesia is riveting and wonderful in its old-fashioned style, connecting contemporary concerns with forgotten history. It highlights the importance in understanding the past in order to not only make sense of the present but to more intelligently question it, and deal with it. But it is also a deeply disappointing novel for how it is structured and what it chooses to delve into, at the expense of the present. The ending is also a bit of a let-down, feeling sadly anti-climactic. I greatly appreciated learning about Gaby’s motives, her youthful activism when trying to bring justice against a water-polluting company, Agrikem, but as engaging as her childhood and adolescence is to read about, it’s also quite lengthy and for a long time you’re not at all sure where it’s going. The links between Agrikem, the prisons, the overturning of Whitlam’s government and, frankly, everything else seemed a bit tenuous, in that elements of the plot seemed to get dropped and forgotten (the irony!). Though it could also be the effect of several months having gone by since I read this.

There is a lot to enjoy here, and enjoy it I did, for all its tendency to be a bit convoluted (even bloated) at times.

It is always hard to review a novel that contains an unexpected twist about a third of the way through – rather like Never Let Me Go (though everyone else spoiled that, especially when the movie came out). What’s especially annoying in this case is that something I read somewhere gave away the twist in this wonderful book – something read in an unguarded moment, just as Nikki Gemmell gave away the twist of Gone Girl (without warning) in her column for The Weekend Australian Magazine. I was pretty pissed about that.

So I already knew about Fern when I started this book, making the twist vanish entirely. I don’t want to do that to anyone else, but I’m not sure how to discuss this book without it – which is probably why I’ve let it go so long before attempting to review it.

I will say this: I loved this book, regardless. The narrator, Rosemary, a uni student in the present, explores her unusual childhood and where – when – everything changed. Her older brother Lowell is on the run from the FBI; Rosemary has made a new friend, Harlow, who gets her in trouble with the police; and, finally, Rosemary learns the truth about Fern and goes looking for her. The non-linear nature of the story’s structure, as well as the tenuous nature of memory and false memories, make this a rich and unpredictable book, while the ethical and moral questions posed are compelling.

The nature of childhood, loyalty, love and envy are all explored here, as is human nature and the meaning of our relationships, not just with each other but with other creatures too. I may have been slightly disappointed by the ending, perhaps because I was expecting something darker or more climactic, but it works and feels true.

I first bought this book in February 2011, when I was back in Australia and wanted to grab a few titles I couldn’t, at the time, get in Canada. It’s sad that it’s taken me nearly 6 years to get around to reading it, especially considering how enjoyable it is. It certainly would have increased my homesickness at the time – maybe that’s why I didn’t read it then. Jasper Jones has been liberally compared to To Kill a Mockingbird (most notably, by The Monthly); some go so far as to call it “derivative” while it has also made the First Tuesday Book Club‘s Top 10 List of Aussie Books to Read Before You Die (which, for posterity – because things disappear sometimes – I have saved here as well, including the top 50 list). For the record, I didn’t find it derivative at all. There are parallels between Jones and Mockingbird, which Silvey tips his hat to on numerous occasions through his young, well-read narrator, Charlie Bucktin, but this is a novel that stands on its own. It both highlights the universality of racial prejudice and discrimination, especially amongst ex-colony countries, and adds new layers to the issue – distinctly Australian layers but also stretching out into sexual abuse and class divides.

Taking place over the summer holidays (December to February) in 1965-6, the story begins with thirteen-year-old Charlie’s late-night reading being interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jasper Jones, the fifteen-year-old half-Aboriginal outcast boy who is blamed for absolutely everything in the (fictional) small mining town of Corrigan, WA. Charlie has never met Jasper Jones before, but his reputation precedes him. He feels somewhat dazzled to be singled out and seeks to impress Jasper in small ways. But Jasper has called on him for help in desperate circumstances: in his secret clearing in the bush by a small dam, where Jasper goes to escape the town’s censure, is a girl, hanging by the neck from a tree. It is Laura Wishart, wearing her nightie, dead. Jasper knows for sure that the cops will arrest him for murder and no real investigation will take place: he is the culprit for everything, expendable and unwanted – except on the footy oval, where he excels.

Enlisting Charlie’s help, the two hide the body to give them time to discover what really happened. Charlie’s youthful crush on Laura’s younger sister, Eliza, adds to his sense of personal guilt, while the townsfolk crack down on their children’s freedom in the wake of Laura’s disappearance. Charlie’s best friend, Jeffrey Lu, whose Vietnamese parents mourn the deaths of relatives while being persecuted by the locals – Asians taking jobs from white people, or blamed for the deaths of Australian soldiers fighting a proxy war in Vietnam – is a cricket fanatic and an excellent player, but is sidelined because of his ethnicity. This is the summer in which Charlie Bucktin grows up, falls in love, has his first kiss – and many more – and faces up to the paradoxes of human nature: that we are capable of extreme acts of cruelty towards others, that life isn’t fair or just, but that there is great depths of good in people too.

While at first I worried at the amount of internal reflecting from Charlie – especially problematic with the use of present tense, which requires a much faster pace in order to maintain its ‘in the moment’ dynamic (my dislike for present tense – or the over-use and inappropriate use of present tense – is well documented on my blog) – it develops a nice rhythm as well as Charlie’s character development. This coming-of-age story requires it, in the end, though I maintain that Silvey really didn’t need to use present tense (it was distracting at times, and muddied the flow: ironically, present tense can achieve the direct opposite effect of what it is often intended for, and Silvey is guilty of those narrative tics like “Later…”, which can really only be used when a character or unnamed focaliser is narrating the story as if to an audience).

This is often labelled a Young Adult novel, because of the age of its protagonists, but while To Kill a Mockingbird is quite clearly meant for younger readers (children, in fact), Jasper Jones is much more ‘adult’ in its handling of the themes and broader ideas. From the inherent racism in Australian society, which continues to this day, to the nifty parallels between the Lu family, the Wisharts, Charlie’s own family and, of course, Jasper Jones and the tragic story of his Aboriginal mother, as well as the questions Charlie poses regarding cruelty – all of this makes for a more sophisticated read than Mockingbird, which I foolishly first read as an adult and, while enjoying it and its famous characters, found to be too obvious and moralising for my taste. Here, setting is just as vividly used as in Harper Lee’s book: the mining town of Corrigan is tangible, from the heat to the singletted men to the cricket pitch.

At its heart is Jasper Jones, one of the most sympathetic characters I’ve come across in a while. Jasper Jones – he is often referred to by his full name, like a celebrity – is evidence of all that is wrong in Australian society. You could make this a 2016 novel and not much would change, except the sense of nostalgia would be gone, to be replaced by a dark and disturbing realism. I wonder at that choice, what the mid-60s setting does to the element of hope at the end of the book: how much we need the illusion that all we be well, even though, fifty-odd years later, we know it won’t be.

Ayad Akhtar, author of the successful novel American Dervish (still on my TBR pile), is a Pakistani-American novelist and playwright whose 2013 play Disgraced has been a hit on the stage. I haven’t seen it, unfortunately, but I suspect that the stage production would have all the intensity, dynamism, energy and tension that the script eludes to but lacks. This is a play that doesn’t read all that well, but would be, I’m sure, a strong story in the hands of the right actors and director. That said, it is still a memorable and interesting play to read.

Disgraced is the story of a successful New York couple, Amir and Emily. Amir, a lawyer, is of South Asian origins while his wife, Emily, is a white American. This miscegenation creates instant tension for the audience in the context of place and time, not only because of our cultural understandings around mixed-race couples in post-9-11 America, but because Emily, an artist, is sketching Amir after being inspired by an old painting of a slave. Emily has an interest in middle eastern art and culture, but as much as she understands and sympathises with people like Amir, she doesn’t really know because she’s never lived it. Her white privilege – as well as her class and apparent wealth – shelter her, and cause her to miss the simmering tension in her husband, his prickly argumentativeness.

Religion is, as you might expect, a key element in Disgraced. Amir was raised Muslim but is now an atheist with little patience for any religion, or religious excuses. Still, he lets his nephew and his wife get him involved in the case of an imam being accused of funding terrorism. As a lawyer, he works for a profitable law firm and feels confident that he will make partner, while Emily is given a big break with a solo exhibition at the Whitney, a gallery curated by Isaac whose wife, Jory, is a lawyer at the same firm as Amir. Jory is African-American while Isaac is white; there is clear sexual tension between Emily and Isaac, two white people in mixed-race marriages.

The play builds up to a dinner scene between the two couples, where things get heated. The climax of the play, though, is both shocking in its swift and hideous violence and also inevitable. It is also the moment when you lose respect for the characters and start to feel like we are instruments of our own doom because we are incapable of escaping or surmounting cultural differences, expectations and prejudices. For all Amir is intelligent, highly educated, self-reflective and, in some small ways, a victim, he is also just as human – just as fallible and flawed – as anyone else. Ultimately, it is a play about people who disappoint, in a culture or society that disappoints even more. Several big issues and themes are raised in four short scenes, and Akhtar does well presenting the characters in all their flawed glory without moralising or making clear what course of action is the ‘right’ one. It is clear, however, what is wrong, and one of the interesting things about this play is just many different kinds of things can be deemed ‘wrong’, from adultery to disowning your birth culture, from domestic violence to terrorism.

There are so many ways human beings can stuff up, which Disgraced explores, as well as what we can lose of ourselves and each other in doing so, and what externalities we can be a slave to.

I’m a tentative fan of Sophie Kinsella’s novels – some I have absolutely loved, others have been slightly annoying, while The Undomestic Goddess left me cringing. Finding Audrey is Kinsella’s first Young Adult novel, a sort of John Green-type story but with more human warmth, humour and, frankly, realism than Green (I might be the only person who isn’t gaga over John Green, who is seriously over-rated, but the comparison is a fair one I think). Audrey Turner is a young teen suffering from severe anxiety after an incident at school the year before, in which three girls bullied her to the point of giving her a breakdown. She is slowly showing signs of recovering, but hides behind dark sunglasses, even inside, and rarely ventures out. Her older brother, Frank, spends all his time on the computer playing Land of Conquerors, and their younger brother, Felix, is a delightful toddler. Their parents are showing signs of stress, especially their mother, who puts most of her energy into combating what she sees as Frank’s computer addiction – to the point of throwing his computer out of the upstairs’ bedroom window. In Audrey’s view, the whole family is nuts.

Her psychologist, Dr Sarah, encourages her to make a film, hoping that being behind the camera will help Audrey interact with others. But it is the arrival of Linus, Frank’s teammate for LOC, that makes the most significant change. Audrey’s attraction to Linus and Linus’s patient bridge-building with her pave the way for real improvement, but it’s a tenuous one, easily damaged.

Finding Audrey is both funny and serious, combining real-world issues like bullying with a wry, deprecating tone that helps balance the stresses I feel are coming to dominate the lives of young people. Audrey’s case is an extreme one, but the number of teenagers with anxiety and/or depression seem to be rising. People, even young people, have the capacity to be truly awful to each other, but Finding Audrey is really about the positive, hopeful, loving and loyal connections we make with each other, which can help save us from our worst qualities.

The play Ruben Guthrie, which was made into a feature film (released 2015), is about a young, successful advertising executive (Ruben) whose fiancée, a model called Zoya (whom he started dating when she was just a teenager), challenges him to quit drinking after yet another booze-soaked party leaves him with a broken arm. After Ruben attends his first AA meeting, he celebrates by opening a bottle of champagne; at this point, Zoya walks out, returning to her native country, the Czech Republic, to study documentary filmmaking.

Ruben’s journey to give up the drink is beset on all sides by his parents, his best friend, his boss and the general Australian culture, which links drinking to sport and masculinity. His father, also an alcoholic who has left Ruben’s mother for the Asian chef from his restaurant, tries to get him to drink again, while his boss, an alcoholic who’s been dry for years, tells him point-blank to start drinking again because Ruben just isn’t good at his job otherwise. The perceived connection between alcohol and being creative (a la Hunter S Thompson) is reminiscent of the view that smoking weed is a must for artists. Ruben’s best friend, a gay man recently returned from a failed job in the States, presents the biggest challenge for Ruben when he turns up with bottles of duty free booze. All around him, the message is the same: drink up, you’re a bore without it.

Despite still being engaged to Zoya, Ruben becomes involved with a woman from the AA meetings, Virginia, and the comparisons between Alcoholics Anonymous and a religious cult become apparent. Virginia makes the ‘other side’ less than appealing, and really, when it comes down to it, everyone is revealed as less than worthy in this play. I can’t help but feel it is an apt reflection of Australian society. We sell an image not just to the world but to ourselves, but ultimately, our culture has so many problems – drinking is just one of many.

A timely story about Australian culture’s messed-up relationship with booze, and how we actively sabotage people’s efforts at change.

Unsticky was recommended to me by Angie (Angieville) many years ago, and I am pleased to have finally read it. It’s an interesting novel, not quite what I expected, with Grace being a mix of Sophie Kinsella’s shopaholic and Bridget Jones, and the love interest, Vaughan – a sickeningly rich art dealer – being a far from likeable character. It has humour but it is shadowed by a tense edginess, and overall left me feeling quite unsettled. It’s still compulsive reading; while long, it isn’t slow or tedious. It is a kind of coming-of-age story for Grace, a maligned, lowly assistant at a fashion magazine whose boss, Kiki, is truly quite horrible. I expected Grace to give it the flick but she doesn’t, she soldiers on and actually, finally, makes some progress there – all because of the new confidence and assertiveness, not to mention other polishing skills, she acquires as Vaughan’s mistress.

It’s Eliza Doolittle with sex, really. And there’s plenty of it – not overly detailed, but the tension is ever-present. Vaughan’s no real hero, in fact he’s a bit of a prick, but Manning does a good job of making both Grace and Vaughan believable, and their attraction to each other believable as well – especially on Grace’s side. Grace’s growing up isn’t rushed, but she does mature and improve for the better. I’m not so sure about Vaughan, though, and in the end I still wouldn’t want to spend social time in his company. Having said all that, I like books that make me uneasy, that aren’t always comfortable, so I do recommend this as an edgier ‘chick-lit’ type of read.